Chefs, Authors, Bloggers and Cooks Explore Umami
Yesterday’s New York Times featured an article on chef David Burke’s experimentations with umami, the fifth flavor. Although it has only recently been confirmed that human tongues have taste receptors that detect umami, the taste, which is alternately described as “savory” or “meaty,” has been known in Japan since its discovery in 1908 by scientist Kitunae Ikeda.
While the Times story reports that umami is the taste of glutamate, a recently published cookbook by Anna and David Kasabian, The Fifth Taste, declares that umami is not just the taste behind monosodium glutamate–the controversial food additive MSG. Umami is the taste of amino acids, which are necessary nutrients that the human body uses to build muscle tissue, enzymes and which aid in various bodily processes. Clearly, learning to crave the taste of proteins and amino acids has a distinct evolutionary advantage.
I have to admit to a certain satisfaction upon reading yesterday’s article, as I have been writing a series of posts at my own food blog, Tigers and Strawberries, on the subject of umami since January 3.
While the New York Times piece, “The Fifth Taste Emerges From the Brine,” focuses on the umami present in tea and seaweed, the taste is present in many other ingredients. Asian condiments, sauces and soy-based ingredients are laden with umami; my theory is that Asian cooks learned to use these ingredients to replace the flavor of meat in many of their dishes, due to religious reasons or simple matters of economy.
Umami may be a Japanese word, and there are dozens of Asian ingredients teeming with its taste, but there are plenty of Western ingredients from European and American culinary traditions that are also good sources of umami. Tomatoes, hard cheeses such as parmesian, anchovies, porcini mushrooms and corn all contain heavy concentrations of amino acids which give a strong umami taste. Meat, poultry and seafoods, are made primarily of protein, and thus have significant umami taste; older birds, meat with bones and shellfish in the shell have the most umami. (Hence the use of fish, animal, and bird bones or shellfish shells in stocks.)
Even human breast milk contains a hefty dose of umami in the form of glutamate, as reported in The Anchorage Press’s January 12 article, “Who’s Afraid of Monsodium Glutamate?”
Though there are skeptics who refute that umami is an actual basic taste which humans evolved the ability to perceive like sweet, salty, bitter and sour, it seems that umami is here to stay. Chefs like David Burke, and those who contributed to the recipes in The Fifth Taste, will continue to experiment with new ways to boost the flavor of foods using umami in creative ways, while ordinary cooks can learn to use these ingredients to create incredibly flavorful dishes at home.
Even my fifteen-year-old daughter has gotten into the act. After hearing me go on about umami for a couple of weeks, and looking at The Fifth Taste, she got the idea for a stir fry recipe that would feature a plethora of umami-rich ingredients all cooked together in a hot wok.
Morganna’s Umami Chicken, Mushrooms and Gai Lan
Ingredients:
1 pound boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into thin slices
2 tablespoons Shao Hsing wine
1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
peanut oil for stir frying–3-4 tablespoons
1 large shallot, peeled and sliced thinly (or one small onion)
2 tablespoons fermented black beans, lightly crushed
1 medium hot chile, sliced thinly
1 1/2″ cube ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
6 black mushrooms, soaked in warm water, squeezed dry, stemmed, caps sliced thinly
8 fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed, caps sliced thinly
2 tablespoons aged soy sauce
2 tablespoons Shao Hsing wine
2/3 pound gai lan, trimmed, and both leaves and stems cut into 2″ lengths
1/2 cup mixed mushroom water and chicken broth
1/4 teaspoon sesame oil
Method:
Mix chicken breast slices with wine and cornstarch and allow to marinate for at least twenty minutes.
Heat wok until it smokes. Add oil, and heat until it shimmers and just starts to think about smoking. Add shallot, black beans and chile and stir fry vigorously until shallots begin to brown and turn golden. Toss in ginger and garlic and continue stir frying about one more minute, taking care to keep it all moving so the garlic doesn’t take it in its mind to burn.
Add both kinds of mushrooms, and stir fry for about thirty seconds, then add chicken. Spread over bottom of wok in a single layer and allow to brown on the bottom for about thirty to forty seconds before tossing hither and yon in the wok rapidly. When the pink is halfway gone, add the soy sauce and wine, and continue stir frying until it is mostly cooked.
Add gai lan, pour in the broth and mushroom soaking liquid mixture and toss. Cover wok with domed lid, allow liquid to simmer for about forty seconds to a minute, take off lid and stir fry until most of the sauce is thickened and clinging to the food, and the gai lan is bright green and crunchy-tender.
Take off heat, drizzle with sesame oil, stir once more, then scrape from wok into warmed serving platter.
